The Ice Planet
September 02, 2010
A quibbling critic ought to pick the BBC’s Sherlock apart. Admirers of Arthur Conan Doyle would expect nothing less than a fanatical concentration on minute flaws, after all. “The little things are infinitely the most important,” says Holmes in A Case of Identity. His 21st-century successor accepted loose ends and unexplained solutions with a nonchalance the master would never have tolerated.
In the opening episode, a taxi-driver forced his victims to choose from two pills — one deadly, one safe. Holmes never explained why the victim always picked the fatal poison and the driver always swallowed the harmless pill. In the final programme, Moriarty set Holmes multiple challenges and storylines careered across the screen with dizzying speed. Holmes tried to save pensioners and children from being turned into human bombs, unmask an art fraud, stop an insurance swindle, find stolen government secrets and solve an old case of a murdered teenage swimmer. Television’s fear of allowing a plot the time to develop was on display once again. The action had to be relentless to stop the feckless viewer reaching for the remote.
Yet quibblers must learn to sit back and take in the show on occasion if we are not to turn into lawyers.
Carry on reading
by Nick Cohen at September 02, 2010 10:20 AM
August 30, 2010
From Standpoint.
Contemplating with his customary scorn the artists who had embraced the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wondered what it would take to break their attachment to a cause that would eventually murder many of them — and kill Trotsky too, although he was yet to know it. “As regards a fellow-traveller,” he said, “the question always comes up — how far will he go?” Would the barbarism of the dictatorship of the proletariat persuade him to “change at one of the stations on to the train going the other way”? Or would he stay on for the rest of the ride?
As Trotsky implied, fellow-travelling with communism was not always akin to endorsing the creed. Communists accepted crimes committed in the name of the revolution without hesitation. The fellow-traveller looked away from communism’s victims and invited others to do the same. Communists damned “bourgeois democracy”. It disillusioned communism’s fellow-travellers, too, but not enough to persuade them to give up on democratic politics completely and join the revolution. They wished the Soviet Union well and found its experiments on the human race bracing. But in the words of David Caute, the best historian of fellow-travelling, their support was a “commitment at a distance”.
The reception given to Tariq Ramadan when he arrived in New York in April showed that today a type of fellow-travelling with radical Islam has spread from Europe to America. From the applause he drew, it seemed to me that no one involved would be changing trains for a while.
Read the whole thing
by Nick Cohen at August 30, 2010 11:18 AM
Daily Mail, 30 August 2010
George Smiley would never have behaved like this.
Ever since the body of the GCHQ code-breaker Gareth Williams was discovered stuffed into a hold-all in his bath, we have been treated to a stream of unsavoury and contradictory leaks from mysterious sources.
The story is throwing up more obfuscatory trade-craft than a John Le Carré novel. Of course, the secret intelligence world must of necessity work in a deeply shadowy way — concealing its tracks, laying false trails and employing sundry other means of disinformation.
It does so in order to keep this country safe from its enemies. So much is generally accepted. But when one of its number is found apparently murdered in a flat in central London, you do not expect these black arts of subterfuge to continue.
You certainly don’t expect them to thwart the investigation of an apparently sinister death or cause further and needless distress to the dead man’s bereaved parents. Yet this is precisely what seems to have happened after the discovery of Mr Williams’s body.
It appears that he was no ordinary GCHQ operative but a vitally important contributor to the defence of the West. A brilliant mathematical boffin, he was helping to oversee a network which links satellites and super-computers in Britain and the U.S. with those of other key allies.
He had also worked on breaking coded Taliban messages, helping to save the lives of countless British and other Nato soldiers under attack in Afghanistan.
So his death would seem to have serious security implications of one kind or another — including the possibility that he was murdered by enemies of this country.
Yet shadowy unnamed sources started putting it about that ‘bondage equipment and gay paraphernalia’ were found in his flat. The implication was that his death was caused by some seedy sadomasochistic practice that went wrong.
At a stroke, Mr Williams’s reputation was trashed — transforming him from an unsung hero of his nation into the sordid author of his own terminal misfortune.
Not surprisingly, this planted suggestion greatly upset his grieving family, who protested at the ‘horrible and completely fictitious accounts of his private life’.
More remarkably, it was refuted in the strongest possible terms by the police who said no such paraphernalia had been found in Mr Williams’s flat — although they wouldn’t comment on the suggestion that he was indeed gay.
None of us has the faintest idea why or how he died. But why would these shadowy sources — whoever they may be — want to blacken his name like this?
Of course, it is possible that he was killed by a lover. Most killings, after all, have a rather more prosaic cause than an assassination perpetrated by clandestine agents.
But why plant this suggestion — and in the most lurid and apparently untruthful way — before the police have even established how or when he met his death?
Maybe a clue lies in the further claim that some £18,000 disappeared from one of his bank accounts two months ago — money reportedly moved ‘by complex means’, leading to speculation that Mr Williams was being blackmailed.
It is possible there is an entirely innocent explanation for all that, too. But why are we being treated to this drip-drip of partial, sensational and contradictory information while a criminal investigation is going on?
It all sounds disturbingly similar to the case of Jonathan Moyle, another British intelligence agent whose body was found hanging inside a hotel wardrobe in the Chilean capital Santiago in 1990 with a padded noose around his neck.
He had been investigating a company which was modifying helicopters, possibly to carry nuclear weapons, to sell to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But MI6 planted the suggestion that he had died while engaged in an auto-erotic act.
It took his outraged father to discover that his son had probably been drugged, suffocated, injected with a lethal substance and then strung up in the wardrobe — a view supported by the British coroner, who returned a verdict of unlawful killing at his inquest eight years later.
In the Williams case, it appears that a turf-war has broken out between the police and the intelligence world, with the police complaining that the spooks are hindering their investigation.
So just what does the intelligence world want to cover up in this case? Of course, it is possible that disclosure of the precise circumstances of Mr Williams’s death would compromise national security in some way.
But it is also possible there is a less honourable motive for the dirty tricks being played in this investigation.
Maybe the intelligence world doesn’t want us to know that it didn’t vet Mr Williams thoroughly enough; or alternatvely that it shockingly failed to protect the life of its invaluable code-breaker from foreign or terrorist assailants; or maybe it wants to conceal the identity of a country or group that killed him in order to serve some diplomatic end or other.
Who knows? All we can see is that some very peculiar game is being played around this man’s demise. And it’s hard not to put this together with that other mystery over the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003.
He was said to have committed suicide during the controversy over the Iraq war — a conclusion endorsed by the official inquiry that replaced an inquest into his death.
Yet the evidence suggests that he could not have killed himself, as we have been told, by slitting his ulnar artery and taking an overdose of pills — not least because there was not much blood at the scene and fewer than one tablet was found in his stomach.
We also learn that people who wanted or needed to give evidence at the inquiry were never called to do so.
Now the pathologist who inspected his body has insisted this was a ‘textbook suicide’ — an account that raises more questions than it answers.
True, the idea that Dr Kelly was murdered and that this was covered up in an official conspiracy seems too implausible to be true.
Yet he did possess unique expertise in biological weapons intelligence. So there was a long list of terror organisations or rogue states that may have wanted him dead.
And if it is indeed true that the intelligence world sometimes plants false information that key operatives who have been murdered have instead been responsible for their own deaths, then the questions about Dr Kelly’s ’suicide’ become even more urgent.
No one expects the intelligence services to reveal their trade secrets or to compromise national security. But they are also the servants of a free society. And that means they must observe due process — which means unexplained deaths must be properly investigated.
That means a transparent and thorough investigation. It means holding a proper inquest where evidence about the cause of death can be properly aired and interrogated. And it means not dripping salacious snippets manipulatively into the public domain.
We must also not lose sight of the fact that, however they died, the loss of both David Kelly and now Gareth Williams has deprived us of two of the most brilliant minds in the intelligence world. With their deaths, the defences of this country have been left that much weaker.
The coincidence of two random and unfortunate events? Perhaps. Who knows?
At this rate, none of us will do so.
by Melanie Phillips at August 30, 2010 06:07 AM
August 26, 2010
Rum Doings Episode 42 begins with a story. A very special story which you can buy here.
What we’re not discussing this week is: how do we get Britain’s heathen backside heaved back onto a Christian pew? In an attempt to avoid the topic, we drink some Rum & Raisin non-alcoholic sadness.
Naturally we discuss blocked ears, botched nose operations, dancing, the self-consciousness of theatre, and torrenting. We ponder ad-busting, last names, and green visa-waiver forms. And telephone scams! And John’s accident heroics.
Tweet it, Facebook it, do whatever it is that makes the internet work. And writing a review on iTunes makes us happy in our tummies.
If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, sigh, you can do that here.
To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.
Or you can listen to it right here!
by John Walker at August 26, 2010 11:39 AM
August 22, 2010
‘Who killed David Kelly?” To the uninitiated looking for a thrill this silly season, the answer is clear. In the Mirror and the Mail, high-pitched voices from left and right say that at the very least his death was covered up by Tony Blair, a man they loathe so fervently they cannot even praise him for donating the proceeds of his autobiography to a veterans’ charity. From the demented centre-ground of British politics comes Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP, who by some extraordinary oversight is now a government minister. He has produced a book claiming Kelly was murdered by mysterious Iraqi forces.
To those who followed the affair in 2003, however, there ought to be no mystery. The reason for Kelly’s death is a secret in plain view, which few can acknowledge because it chills the warm feelings of self-righteousness which Tony Blair’s enemies enjoy.
Kelly was the BBC’s source. The BBC betrayed him.
Allow me to drag up this ancient history because the reaction to it sheds light on the hysteria around Blair’s autobiography, which is only going to get worse in the run-up to its publication.
Read on
by Nick Cohen at August 22, 2010 07:16 AM
‘Who killed David Kelly?” To the uninitiated looking for a thrill this silly season, the answer is clear. In the Mirror and the Mail, high-pitched voices from left and right say that at the very least his death was covered up by Tony Blair, a man they loathe so fervently they cannot even praise him for donating the proceeds of his autobiography to a veterans’ charity. From the demented centre-ground of British politics comes Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP, who by some extraordinary oversight is now a government minister. He has produced a book claiming Kelly was murdered by mysterious Iraqi forces.
To those who followed the affair in 2003, however, there ought to be no mystery. The reason for Kelly’s death is a secret in plain view, which few can acknowledge because it chills the warm feelings of self-righteousness which Tony Blair’s enemies enjoy.
Kelly was the BBC’s source. The BBC betrayed him.
Allow me to drag up this ancient history because the reaction to it sheds light on the hysteria around Blair’s autobiography, which is only going to get worse in the run-up to its publication.
Read on
by Nick Cohen at August 22, 2010 06:52 AM
August 19, 2010
As you’ll have noticed, by Episode 41 we’re not funny any more. But it’s fun to remember when we were.
You may also be wondering where episode 40 is. Well, it’s slipped out of time, and you’ll have to live with that. It might come back later.
Together we don’t discuss whether we should bring back fox hunting, but we do drink blackcurrant and rum wine. Then Nick demands that John talk about web comics. We discuss our favourite comic to hate, User Friendly. And as mentioned, here’s John’s decade-old spoof:
And then Nick makes John talk about Brian’s Guide. And banks. And FOSDEM. There’s a horrible story about the Discovery Channel, and uplifting stories about people’s generosity.
Then Mega Drives. And the future of consoles. And somehow Nick initiates this discussion. And just in case we’ve not been funny enough, we talk about speed cameras and car accidents.
Tweet it, Facebook it, do whatever it is that makes the internet work. And writing a review on iTunes makes us happy in our tummies.
If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, sigh, you can do that here.
To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.
Or you can listen to it right here!
by John Walker at August 19, 2010 01:01 PM
August 18, 2010
August 15, 2010
August 12, 2010
Episode 39 sees us not discussing: What can we do about Hula Hoops and comic books and their effect on the moral turpitude of the youth?
Back on creaky furniture, arguing over mead, things feel very traditional but for Nick’s peculiar quietness. We talk about times in the witch-encrusted New Forest. Nick reveals the location of Anne Frank’s remains. Nuts are put in their place.
We consider accents, shrieking families, and morris dancing. We talk with pleasure about Radio 4′s former quiz show All The Way From Memphis. There’s thoughts on Sherlock, Nick’s holidays, and John’s world exclusive weight loss programme. And Bath’s weather.
Tweet it, Facebook it, do whatever it is that makes the internet work. And writing a review on iTunes makes us happy in our tummies.
If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, sigh, you can do that here.
To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.
Or you can listen to it right here!
by John Walker at August 12, 2010 02:58 PM
August 08, 2010
August 07, 2010
It’s five years since I began the Nee Naw blog. Back then, I thought that few people beyond my real life friends would be interested. I was delighted when it started getting over fifty readers per day. Four years later, that became in excess of three thousand readers and, beyond my wildest dreams, a book deal!
I have had some brilliant experiences because of this blog. For instance, appearing live on Radio Four (and nervously talking nonsense about stink bombs), being the subject of a four page spread in The Times, having boxes of Percy Pigs unexpectedly turn up in the post and seeing my book sandwiched between Cheryl Cole and Russell Brand in the biography section (though I was less impressed to find it in the “Tragic Life Stories” section at Smiths in Walthamstow). I will never forget all the great people at Penguin who worked so hard with me to make my book just how I dreamed it would be. But best of all are the emails I got (and am still getting) from readers, who tell me that they’ve learned something from me, and that because of Nee Naw they’ve managed to stay calm in an emergency, or go on a first aid course, or even apply to become an EMD like me!
Unfortunately, my fifteen minutes of fame also had its downside, and without going into detail, in the end I felt I had no alternative but to bring Nee Naw to its end. I’m posting this now because I don’t want you to think that I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, or taken the money and run. I miss my blog more than you can imagine. Sometimes on my break I will sit mentally composing blog posts from the day’s calls, then I realise there is no longer anywhere for them to go, and those posts shrivel and die. As a blogger without a blog, sometimes I feel like I have shrivelled and died a little bit too.
Some days I think of starting a new blog, about one of my other passions – Leyton Orient? Katie Price? Percy Pigs? I can’t imagine many people would want to read that, let alone publish it, and maybe that’s the whole point.
Until then, I’d just like to thank everyone for reading and supporting me for these last five years.
Goodbye for now!
Suzi
by Suzi Brent at August 07, 2010 12:49 PM
August 05, 2010
Reporters do not always treat subs well. On occasion, when pushed beyond endurance by the cutting of our best lines, or a puritan purge of all our gags, we tell the old joke about the plane carrying a sub and a reporter crashing in the Sahara. For three days they walk through the burning heat until finally they collapse, skin burning, throats parched, at the base of a huge sand dune. ‘Let us just climb to the top of the dune,’ croaks the reporter.
‘I can’t,’ says the sub, ‘let us curl up here and die’.
‘No!’ says the reporter, ‘we must make one last effort.’ And somehow they haul their dehydrated bodies, two steps forward, one step back, to the top to see…a beautiful blue oasis on the other side.
They stumble down to the lake. It is not a mirage. The reporter plunges his cupped, blistered hands into the cool water of life. Only to see the sub unzip his trousers and piss in it.
“What the hell to you think you are doing,” he bellows.
“I’m making it better,” the sub replies.
Carry on reading
by Nick Cohen at August 05, 2010 04:50 PM
It’s the summer, and to celebrate Nick and I are giving ourselves a break from the sickening sight of each other. So this Episode 38 is something of a “best of” I discovered while rooting around in the attic fifty years in the future. It collects together moments from episodes 1 to 10, which I’d forgotten, and you probably did too.
Don’t ignore it just because of that! It’s really good! It’s the half hour of decent bits from the first 450. In hindsight we probably should have included more decent bits. Nick sings! John doesn’t! The origin of cream teas! What an unbelievable treat.
Tweet it, Facebook it, do whatever it is that makes the internet work. And writing a review on iTunes makes us happy in our tummies.
If you want to email us, you can do that here. If you want to be a “fan” of ours on Facebook, sigh, you can do that here.
To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.
Or you can listen to it right here!
by John Walker at August 05, 2010 03:07 PM
August 04, 2010
Sore back? Flaky skin? Difficulty sleeping at night? Why not try church?!
For a few years now there’s been a project called Back To Church Sunday. It’s the peculiar name for a day that encourages people to attend church on that one occasion (that isn’t Christmas or Easter), with the assumption implicit in the title that they simply must have been before. (Apparently, when it began, it was intended to encourage those who have left to return, but now its remit has expanded. Unfortunately its name has not.) Presumably the intention is if you can encourage people to come along just this once they’ll realise what they’re missing out on, and choose to stick around.
However, the somewhat awkwardly arrogant name is not the real issue about the campaign. That real issue would be that almost nowhere on their website or promotional materials do they make any mention of God or Jesus, or anything that Christianity is about. Instead they’re trying to sell you your local church as a quality spa day for you and your best friends.
The clearest example of this is their radio advert, which I’ve streamed below. Just hit the play button.
A few choice quotes:
“It makes me feel good about myself.”
“If I’ve had a rough week, I can just leave it all behind.”
“Friends, family, fun… I just love it!”
It’s church as beauty therapy. It’s a way to relax, unwind, and just let your hair down with friends. Forget all the tough things in life! Come to church!
It’s about as far from any understanding of church as I can imagine.
Let’s define terms. “Church”, unhelpfully, has at least three distinct meanings. There’s church the building. There’s church the institution. And there’s church the body – the family of people. Presumably this campaign is aiming for a conflation of the first and last – they want to get you into the church building, so you become a member of the church body. And it’s partly this conflation that leads to the peculiarly atheistic delivery of their campaign.
Church has a responsibility to be otherly. It should be unrecognisably different. The desperate attempts by all manner of church groups to reinvent themselves as a diluted simulacrum for something currently fashionable or popular is the absolute antithesis of its purpose. Church should stand out against the rest of the world, it should be counter-cultural, unsettlingly alternative. Disguising church, attempting to hold up a painted sheet of a trendy wine bar to trick people in, is a sad, sad sight. “Look at us! We’re a bit like that other thing you like!”
I love church. I understand this to mean the ‘body’ of Christ, the collection of people with whom I co-labour in the act of being church. And yes, I have great friends there. I have fun with those people. In many ways, I feel better about myself. But that is a sliver of its reality. Church is really tough. To be a Christian isn’t a badge for a club – it’s a decision to live life in constant turmoil, face incessant challenges, and be enormously open to change. (Even the most traditional of Anglican churches, stuck in their centuries-old ways, on their centuries-old pews, are still – hopefully, in their own odd way – encouraging some form of change in their congregations.) To put yourself in the body of a church is to agree to transformation and revelation.
To be a part of church is to embrace sacrifice. It’s to serve others. To change your priorities. It’s to recognise hard times and face them. Christianity is a faith that says, “whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” Christianity is a faith that includes the lamentations of those for whom God made life incredibly difficult. It’s a faith that says we must be challenged and transformed by that which is Other. It says we must love our enemies. We must stand out.
It’s fantastic. It’s fantastic because of the tough stuff, on top of the extraordinary joy that is knowing that you are created and loved by God, alive with purpose, and living because of the sacrifice of Jesus. It’s fantastic to be a part of something that repels the notions of existing to serve oneself, of seeking to take from others.
It’s not a spa.
And most of all, to focus on the most egregious of all the comments made in their advert, it’s not a place to go after a rough week leaving all your troubles behind. It’s a place to take your troubles to. That’s the whole point! Church is where I take my broken, crumpled self, and serve others, love others. Love that brings about change.
I recognise how extraordinarily unlikely it is that an organisation would put out an advert with people saying, “I go along every week, and it just gets harder and harder. I really feel like giving up.” But I’ve known many people who’ve felt this way. People who don’t give up, and then see extraordinary change. But wow, imagine if their advert did say that. THAT would be counter-cultural.
But I absolutely do not expect an organisation such as this to avoid the words “God” and “Jesus”.
I mean, I get that fear. Typing them here, on this blog – the blog on which I write about television and videogames – is pretty terrifying. I imagine people reading this and thinking me a loony, deleting the blog from their RSS feeds. I think: “Maybe if I just remove those bits and make it more of my usual ranting about a crappy advert, that’ll be easier.” I get that it makes for a difficult commercial, having someone say “Jesus”. All that baggage, all the assumptions made. Heck, when I hear someone say “Jesus” on the radio my immediate response is to worry about what’s coming next, and assume the worst. I get why people try to avoid using those words. It’s fear and shame.
In their “What Is BTCS?” section, they list “Success Stories“. Nowhere in this mini-interview with a nice lady who found she liked church does it mention God, Christ, relationship, love… She talks about how it’s not as stuffy and boring as she remembered, how it made her laugh. You know that old restaurant where the food used to be so bland? It’s a bit better these days.
I’m certain that Back To Church Sunday has good intentions. They want to see people coming along to church. They want this because they want those people to get engaged with it, to fall in love with God. I’m sure that’s their motivation. They’re also about trying to get those currently in church to invite their friends, to “evangelise”. There’s obviously a lot of inter-church “initiatives” going on, trying to push the notion nationwide. (Oddly, their website – referenced in their radio advert – seems to be focused on those already in church, convincing them to invite others. A strange choice bearing in mind the nature of their publicity.)
But in stripping out all that church exists for, replacing it with asinine statements of what a lovely social club it is, they’re either ashamed, naive, or attempting to hoodwink people into joining. None seems a good option. They’re trying to sell The Church Show. “Come along! It’s not quite as boring as you remember!”
I would very much love for people to try out church. But I want people to go in with expectations not only of receiving, but of giving too. Expectations of challenge, of tough times, as well as joy and love. Not of joining a gym with a lovely sauna, but of joining a revelatory, life-transforming, counter-cultural force, driven by love.
by John Walker at August 04, 2010 09:06 AM
August 02, 2010
Daily Mail, 2 August 2010
When the Tories fought the general election, they promised they would yield no more power to the European Union, and that they would even seek to regain from the EU some of the powers that Britain had already lost.
These pledges were designed to take the sting out of the fact that they were not, after all, going to offer a referendum on the European constitution.
Three months on, it looks increasingly as if none of their promises to safeguard British power is going to be kept. Indeed, the coalition Government even seems to be going in precisely the opposite direction.
Last week, Home Secretary Theresa May told the Commons that Britain had decided to opt into the controversial European Investigation Order.
According to critics, this will mean that prosecutors from any EU country will be granted unprecedented and intrusive powers over people in Britain.
They would be able to bug the phone calls of British citizens, monitor their bank accounts and gain access to their DNA if they suspected them of committing a crime in those countries — however trivial the offence, and even if it were not a crime in the UK.
Britain’s over-stretched police would not only be almost powerless to prevent such personal details from being handed over, but they could even be ordered to carry out investigations or surveillance for their EU counterparts.
Such powers would be an outright onslaught on British liberties and independence. Yet Mrs May — cheered on by Labour MPs, who fell over themselves to welcome her announcement — airily swatted away such concerns.
Far from the police being over-burdened or civil liberties being lost, she trilled, the new order would actually reduce bureaucracy by merely codifying and simplifying processes that already exist.
Ring any bells? As was pointed out by concerned MPs, precisely the same bogus assurances were made during the passage of the Lisbon constitutional treaty, whose fundamental destruction of British sovereignty was repeatedly described as just a ‘practical’ or ‘tidying-up’ measure.
Mrs May claimed all worries about the new European order would be addressed. She would seek to ensure a proportionality test to prevent the British police from being obliged to provide information in relation to trivial offences.
And foreign authorities would not be allowed to instruct British police officers on what operations to conduct, nor allow foreign officers to operate in the UK with law-enforcement powers.
But with the history of the EU and the relentless salami-slicing of British sovereignty, does anyone believe these proposed safeguards will amount to anything?
As Mrs May herself admitted, the Government merely intends to negotiate such safeguards with the EU. There is no guarantee that it will succeed.
Indeed, as the final text will be determined by qualified majority vote, it is all too likely that it will not. And once we have opted in, if we find the order does work against British interests, there will be absolutely nothing we can do about it.
The key point is this: the Government could have decided to have nothing to do with this order. Instead, it chose to opt in. So it appears that, far from regaining powers from the EU, this Government is actually choosing to give yet more of them away.
Accused in the Commons of betraying the Tories’ promise to protect British sovereignty, Mrs May took refuge in positively Orwellian language. The new power, she said, entailed no loss of sovereignty. It would merely improve European co-operation to make it easier for Britain to fight crime.
Such a seamless progression from passionately opposing European integration to adopting the cynical euphemisms employed by the previous Labour government to conceal its encroachment makes one despair that the Tories will do anything at all to regain any of Britain’s powers to govern itself.
The loss of these powers is proving positively dangerous not just to British interests but to British lives.
A year after the EU directive limiting workers to a 48-hour week was applied to the NHS, 80 per cent of hospital consultants polled by the Royal College of Surgeons now say the quality of care has already been damaged by the change.
Senior doctors say trainee surgeons are now spending so little time in operating theatres that they lack the skills required to perform safely when they became consultants.
Even worse, they say, the new rules are creating a generation of ‘clock-watchers’ — doctors with a ‘lazy work ethic’ who no longer feel personal responsibility for their patients, who as a result are being put at risk by being repeatedly ‘handed’ from one shift to the next.
One surgeon, who works a regular 80 to 100-hour week with no pay for the extra hours because he says there is no alternative if his patients are to be cared for safely, reports that during the middle of one operation he was left to struggle to complete it alone after the newly appointed trainee assisting him said he had to go home because he had reached the limit of his rostered hours.
Such developments are almost beyond belief. It is hard to exaggerate the degree of recklessness and stupidity behind applying such a directive to the medical profession.
Only the most bone-headedly blinkered bureaucratic mind — one which is entirely divorced from reality — can fail to grasp the inevitable risk to patients inherent in limiting doctors’ hours.
That mindset is unfortunately the driving force of what is now an entire bureaucratic quasi-state called the EU — without whose directive British doctors’ training would not now be going down the drain.
It is simply intolerable that this potentially lethal destruction of medical standards is being enforced by an authority which has superseded the ability of the British Government to decide how this country’s doctors should be trained.
The president of the Royal College of Surgeons, John Black, has described this situation as ‘acutely urgent’ and implored the Government to take immediate action to address the concerns — having pledged in its coalition agreement that it would work to limit the application of the EU’s rules in the UK.
One has to ask, however, what price that pledge now. The Tories are in coalition with the Lib Dems, who are fanatical European integrationists.
After the Home Secretary’s statement on the European Investigation Order, the sole Lib Dem MP who spoke welcomed it and expressed the pious hope that it would strengthen privacy and human rights safeguards. So much for the party of civil liberty.
But even if the Tories had been in government by themselves, it is doubtful they would have behaved any differently. For the plain truth is that Britain cannot hope to regain any of its powers from the EU unless it makes clear that if it doesn’t get what it wants, it will leave.
That is a declaration the Cameroons would never make. And so all their pledges to hold the line for British sovereignty were always meaningless.
The consequence of such pusillanimity is that, despite their strutting ambitions, they are, in fact, losing power as remorselessly as a car with a leaky petrol tank. In time, the British Government will have no greater power than Westminster regional council in the Republic of Euroland.
David Cameron says he will fight to get Turkey into the EU. Wouldn’t it be preferable if he tried instead to get Britain out?
by Melanie Phillips at August 02, 2010 08:13 AM
July 29, 2010
We’re not really here. We’re in the past. In Episode 37 of Rum Doings we’re speaking to you from history. We’re not discussing whether organic produce is worth the premium for hard-working families.
Can you still lie in? Should God save the Queen? Then something I can’t bring myself to even type. But we can all see who really has the problem, Nick.
Once Nick stops upsetting John with horrible comments (surely this time he’ll garner complaints – come on people, complain), he then criticises John’s job. Then criticises his washing machine.
Why are John and Nick still friends, despite everything? What’s the secret to our parody of success?
Nick needs some suggestions for stopping the nasty boys in his neighbourhood on their noisy bikes. John tries to defend GPs. We then argue for more traffic wardens, and Traffic Politeness Officers. And the taint of BMWs.
Then we ponder the great debate of our time: how do you deal with a fly in your cake cabinet in Starbucks? And when should you sue a Starbucks?
Pencils, handwriting, typing, we cover all the big issues.
Then the tale of when Chris Eubank crushed John’s hand, and his ensuing madness.
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by John Walker at July 29, 2010 11:51 AM
July 26, 2010
Daily Mail, 26 July 2010
As the probation service seeks to defend itself over the Jon Venables debacle, there is a wider sense that this country is simply losing the plot over law and order.
Venables, one of the two children who tortured and murdered toddler James Bulger in 1993, was returned to jail last week following his conviction for downloading and distributing child pornography after nine years out of prison on licence.
It is, of course, extremely disturbing that such a high-profile criminal was allowed to spiral out of control like this while under the supposedly close supervision of a senior probation officer. But even if the probation service was at fault, the failure here clearly goes far deeper.
For Venables had twice been arrested in 2008 — over a drunken street brawl and for possessing cocaine. At that stage, clearly off the rails, he should have been recalled to prison.
But the key point is that this whole spiral of drink, drugs, violence and paedophilia demonstrates the terrible mistake made in releasing him on licence in 2001, since, as we can now see, he was profoundly unable to live a normal, stable life.
The only reason he was released was the obsessive concern that he shouldn’t be transferred at the age of 18 from a children’s home into the prison system — a concern rooted in the visceral belief that prison only ever makes bad people worse.
This belief has now progressed far beyond the beard-and-sandals brigade into the heart of the political and criminal justice establishment — so much so that it has led even ministers from the party traditionally identified with ‘law and order’ to say some extremely silly things.
Thus the Tory Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said there were far too many people in prison since crime was falling.
When it was pointed out that crime may be falling precisely because so many people were in jail, he blustered that the fall was more likely to be a result of the economy booming. But that couldn’t be so either, because the crime rate fell during the recession, too.
This perverse hostility to imprisonment was then compounded by the Prisons Minister Crispin Blunt’s howler that the UK locks up more people than any other European country.
But the only valid comparator is the number of people jailed per crimes committed. And by that measure, high-crime Britain jails fewer people per 1,000 of the population than European countries such as France, Greece or Spain.
This anti-prisons minister seems determined indeed to ‘hug a hoodie’. His proposal to restore party nights and comedy workshops for prisoners would have been beyond caricature even for the Labour government.
This idea was instantly slapped down by David Cameron. But now, Blunt is reporttionedly considering reducing sentences for thousands of offenders if they make personal apologies to their victims — an idea called ‘restorative justice’, yet another fad with no proven record of success.
Well might people be thinking that the entire system seems to be conspiring to frustrate any meaningful concept of justice.
Last week also saw the unfortunate decision to bring no charges after the death of Ian Tomlinson, who lost his life after being shoved to the ground by a police officer during the G20 demonstrations last year. The Director of Public Prosecutions said conflicting medical evidence made a prosecution impossible.
Indeed, the evidence did conflict. The first doctor who examined Tomlinson said he died of a heart attack. But although two other doctors subsequently said he probably died from injuries he had sustained, they had not examined Tomlinson’s intact body.
The DPP said he therefore couldn’t bring a prosecution because he could not say the case was provable beyond reasonable doubt.
To which a very reasonable response is to say that, with public concern so high over the manner in which Tomlinson met his death, that conflict of evidence should have been put to a jury to decide.
But in fairness to the DPP, he had no alternative. Prosecutors have to be able to prove that a defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt, because the CPS acts as a gatekeeper to the court process and cannot just leave it to a jury to decide.
As for bringing a charge of common assault against the officer who shoved Tomlinson, the time spent investigating the prospect of a manslaughter charge meant the prosecution service had exceeded the time limit for any assault charge.
Like it or not, those are the rules under which the prosecution service operates. And here we begin to get to the heart of what is going wrong across the whole justice system.
Ironically, the prosecution service was set up in the first place only because of a loss of faith in the police arising from a string of miscarriage of justice cases back in the Eighties. These created the perception that the police were out of control and could no longer be trusted to bring cases to court.
Instead of tackling headon the failings within policing culture, the government of the day took power away from the police by establishing the prosecution service to stand as a filter between them and the court process.
This merely put a layer of of ten inadequate bureaucracy in the way of testing a case before a jury. Along with performance targets imposed on the police by Whitehall, it also helped to wreck police morale.
The police retreated from the streets and turned into desk-bound bureaucrats instead, thus eroding their professionalism still further.
In addition, among those criminals who were brought to court, fewer were given punishments that appeared to fit the crime, as prison sentences were cut because the jails were full to bursting.
Governments refused to commit to building enough prisons because of an alliance between the desire to cut costs and a belief that took hold that prison didn’t work. The conviction grew instead that punishing criminals at all was merely a primitive and counter-productive instinct.
The result has been chaos, resulting in the emergence of an injustice system. People living in high-crime black spots have been abandoned by courts refusing to send criminals to jail, a probation service which seems to believe its purpose in life is to uphold criminals’ ‘rights’, and police who have had the professional stuffing knocked out of them.
How can all this have happened?
The fundamental cause has been a collective loss of nerve within the British establishment — and a loss of belief in law and order itself.
We can see this most starkly with the belief among even some senior police officers that the main problem with illegal drugs is the law rather than the drugs themselves.
Here’s the paradox. Those who take a ‘soft’ approach on prisons or sentencing or upholding the law against drugs are said to be progressive. But, in fact, they actually represent a denial of progress.
Those who believe prisons can rehabilitate people, that stiff sentences uphold justice or that policing can prevent crime, all believe society can be made better.
Those who think that imprisonment or laws against drugs are useless are defeatist reactionaries who have lost faith in human redemption, and believe society must instead resign itself to the harm done by crime.
Unfortunately, far from addressing this profound cultural distortion and demoralisation, Conservative ministers appear to be part of the problem.
When their traditional commitment to law and order appears to have become something of which they are now ashamed, what price the Big Society?
by Melanie Phillips at July 26, 2010 08:04 PM
Jewish Chronicle, 22 July 2010
Among those bewildered and horrified by the fact that Israel has been turned into a pariah state, it is common to hear complaints about the uselessness of Israeli PR. But this is to miss the point by a mile.
Yes, there are many examples of amateurishness or inexplicable silence on the part of Israel’s hasbarah effort, although it is getting better.
But the real problem is far deeper. It rests not on the presentation of Israel’s case. It is rooted instead in Israel’s whole strategy for dealing with the pressures upon it, and the way in which it has conceptualised the existential threat it faces from Arab rejectionism. The flawed way it thinks about its own situation has locked it into a vice from which it cannot escape.
The problem has been elegantly summed up by Robert Aumann, an Israeli-American who was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2005 for his work on conflict and co-operation through Game Theory analysis.
In an article on aish.com, he suggests that Israel has fallen into the trap of the Blackmailer Paradox. Rational Israel is being forced to act irrationally, essentially through a chronic lack of confidence in its own position when faced with an implacable opponent.
He uses the analogy of Shimon and Reuben representing the Palestinians and the Israelis who are dividing up a suitcase of money between them. Shimon declares unreasonably he will grab nine-tenths of the money. But, because he says take it or leave it, Reuben is forced to agree to this injustice just to avoid ending up with no money at all.
The present Israeli approach is based on precisely this Blackmailer Paradox. Israel believes that some kind of agreement with the Arabs must be reached at all costs because the present situation is intolerable.
But, at every negotiation, the Arabs take positions that are as unbending as they are unreasonable. So Israel is forced to yield to this blackmail because it fears that otherwise that it will leave the negotiating table with nothing.
The solution, says Aumann, is for Israel to employ correctly the principles of Game Theory. This means first accepting that in the immediate future it may well leave the negotiating table with nothing and that this is better than accepting an erosion of its security.
Second, it should realise that repeating a game many times changes the calculation made by each player. Israel’s refusal to compromise would thus alter the balance of power because the Arabs would realise that they might end up with nothing unless they compromise.
Third, what is absolutely crucial is the player’s unshakeable stance. This not only strengthens him in his conviction that he is right but, more crucially still, it even manages to convince his opponent, too. It thus totally undermines that opponent, forcing him to act irrationally against his own interests in order to reach a compromise.
This is exactly what has happened to Israel. Faced with unjust Arab intransigence, it has been bamboozled over the years into making one compromise after another.
The tragic result is not only that the peace it so desperately seeks becomes ever more elusive. Israel also finds itself damned around the world for resisting an unjust Arab cause because, by failing to undermine the implacable Arab stance, it allows that cause to appear justified.
As Aumann observes, the situation will be resolved only if we convince ourselves of the justice of our views.
Israel should refuse to negotiate against its own interests, which tacitly acknowledges that the Arabs have a case. Instead, it should make the argument from justice and articulate the full extent of the great wrong inflicted by its global tormentors.
Israel needs to reconceptualise the rules of the game it is playing. But, in order to convince the rest of the world, it must first convince itself.
by Melanie Phillips at July 26, 2010 07:49 PM
July 24, 2010
You may have been following the saga of Rev. Stuart Campbell Vs. Benchmark Reviews. You may now be wondering why Stu’s site is dead. Here’s the story.
Someone on Stu’s forum spotted a review on the tech site for a chair. A chair called the Herman Miller Embody. It costs $1200, and will apparently cure world hunger. Large sections of the review read an awful lot like a press release. It was filled with the sorts of daft, exaggerated nonsense that wouldn’t make sense for a reviewer to write. Spurious claims of medical benefits, peculiar puff about its design. Stu wrote about this. People who left comments asking about this found their words were instantly deleted. Stu, who then tried to leave another comment asking why, found himself IP banned from the site. As in, he wasn’t even allowed to look at the site from his computer.
Stu updated about this on his blog. He wrote explaining what was happening, and included some evidence that demonstrated that the text on the Benchmark Review site was absolutely directly from press releases and statements made by Herman Miller. Benchmark responded to this by a) changing those passages that Stu pointed out (then declaring that they’d always been that way), and b) published Stu’s home address and phone number on their forum.
Absolutely extraordinary behaviour. And not, you might consider, the behaviour of a site that had made a legitimate mistake. Were RPS to – and this is the only way I think it could ever happen – accidentally quote a statement from a press release and forget to put it in quotes and cite it, we’d respond to this being pointed out by editing the article so it was correct and saying, “Oops, sorry about that.” We sometimes quote press releases for games that have just been announced, because no independent information is available. So we’d say, “According to the Shootybang VII press release, the game will offer, ‘The greatest shootybangs gaming has ever witnessed.’” Clearly we’d not make such a claim ourselves, but I don’t know, let’s say I had a cold and was attacked by a pirate, I might accidentally forget to put the quote marks in? It seems unlikely. I think it would be reasonably difficult to write an eight page review, and forget every time.
So Stu followed this up, pointing out these changes, and linking to evidence that they had been changed. Around this time I spotted something strange. A huge number of words from this extraordinarily long review for a very expensive chair appeared on another site. A site called Smart Furniture that sold the chair. Entire paragraphs were identical on both sites, rearranged into a different order, and occasionally with tweaks made, but otherwise the exact same copy. So I assumed that there must be a source document, the M to these two sites’ Matthew and Mark. I wrote to Smart asking if they could send me the press releases on which their copy was based. They wrote back telling me it was all their original work. Which seemed more strange.
I wrote back to them asking if they knew Benchmark had lifted it all for their “review” of the chair. I never heard back from Smart Furniture.
Then it got more weird. The Benchmark review, with even more unacknowledged tweaks and changes as the author silently conceded that other parts of the original text weren’t written by him, had some new advertising. Throughout all eight pages are adverts for the Herman Miller Embody chair, available from Smart Furniture.
So now you have a site maintaining it publishes independent reviews, using thousands of words of copy that’s also used on a store selling the product, on which the store advertises the product being reviewed. On no level does it look good. Now, it’s very possible for a site reviewing something to also advertise the same product. Say RPS were to review Shootybang VII, and at the same time the game’s publisher, EvilCorp, had negotiated an ads deal with our ads people, it’s possible that a Shootybang VII review could awkwardly be accompanied by adverts for the same game. Clearly that always looks a bit odd, but as it happens it’s difficult for a site to be dodgy enough to arrange it. Ads are worked out often months in advance, and of course they aren’t specific to one page of the site – the Shootybang VII ad looks less weird on the page talking about our favourite knitting tips. But were our review to contain vast numbers of words identical to those of the Shootybang VII website where you could buy the game, I think it would be very reasonable to start asking some serious questions.
But apparently if you ask those questions, Benchmark get a little cross. Beyond the disgusting behaviour of publishing Stu’s address and phone number, they’ve now started throwing out DMCA takedown claims in every possible direction. And unfortunately most ISPs respond to such claims, no matter how erroneous, by instantly capitulating and removing the site from the internet immediately. So that’s why, if you were wondering, Stu’s blog is currently gone. Hopefully it will be up and running again shortly.
The DMCA claims are completely false. Stu used a screenshot of the Benchmark logo, edited down, to illustrate the piece: perfectly legitimate. (Even the neurotic Google recognises the need to use a Google logo in a story about Google.) And he quoted text from the reviews (oddly enough in quote marks and correctly cited, which perhaps confused Benchmark and made them dizzy), which is absolutely allowed and in no way a violation of copyright.
So if you want to find Stu’s articles on the subject, they are, for now, here.
by John Walker at July 24, 2010 09:48 AM
July 22, 2010
USA Today, 22 July 2010
Despite all the false starts and nail-biting repair attempts on the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, the stain on the sea will eventually dissipate. But can the same be said about the stain on the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain?
As British Prime Minister David Cameron set off for his visit to the USA this week, he said Britain was not dependent upon America and did not owe it “blind loyalty.” This comes, of course, in the wake of months of President Obama’s tongue-lashing of “British Petroleum” — a name BP had not used for many years.
The British people took the president’s words very much amiss, suspicious that he was unfairly singling out BP for blame as a proxy for bashing Britain itself. The British public sourly noted that the role of the two U.S. firms involved in the managing of the Deepwater Horizon rig was ignored, as was the fact that 39% of BP is owned by Americans.
The president’s aggressive rhetoric, including a White House threat to hold a “boot to the throat” of BP, was blamed for wiping billions of pounds off the company’s value. This directly threatened British pension funds, which are heavily reliant on the company’s dividend payments.
But there was also something rather deeper and more atavistic in the British response. Obama’s aggression seemed to bring to the fore a British resentment of the U.S. that is never far from the surface.
This comprises a toxic mixture of intellectual snobbery; a historic fury at America’s late entry into World War II, after which it was perceived to lay claim to the glory; and perhaps most important of all, a deep envy of American wealth and power by a country that decades ago lost not only its empire but also its cultural way and sense of purpose.
Nevertheless, Britain has some cause for complaint from the disdain that Obama has displayed well before the Gulf oil spill. First, he pointedly returned to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that a previous government had bequeathed to the White House as a gift; then he sided with Argentina in its calls for U.N.-brokered negotiations with Britain over the Falkland Islands.
His perceived scapegoating of BP blew the cap off this deep well of bubbling British national affront. A YouGov poll conducted in June found that only 54% of British respondents said they felt favorably toward the United States — down from 66% one month previously.
When asked specifically about how Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill had affected the relationship between Britain and the U.S., 64% said it had weakened it. And 45% said they thought that the relationship has gotten worse since Obama took office in November 2008 — a dramatic increase from the 25% who responded this way the previous month.
As a result, Cameron was criticized for backing the president in his attack on BP for failing to stem the flow of oil, saying he understood Obama’s “frustration.” This was almost certainly because, although he is a Conservative leader, Cameron has taken his party to the left by adopting a green and anti-Big Business agenda.
With feeling in Britain running so high, however, eventually Cameron did publicly warn that BP’s survival was important, and he was credited here with getting the U.S. president to agree that the oil giant must not go under.
Even though the sound and fury over the disaster has calmed, however, the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States has not returned to normal. Something has changed. And the situation is replete with irony.
When President Obama was elected, the British were delighted. They believed he would usher in a repudiation of the George W. Bush years and end what they saw as America’s tendency to throw its weight around the world.
Ironically, it was precisely that perception that got up their noses over BP. They thought that America had now alighted upon some new folk to push around — the British themselves.
Yet even though they have become disillusioned with Obama, the agenda with which they associate him — to end American exceptionalism — is gathering steam in the U.K.
It is hard to overestimate the poisonous belief that Britain was dragged on America’s coattails into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were against its national interest. However strongly others might deplore such sentiments, they have led to a cooling toward the U.S. across the British political spectrum.
Last March, the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said Britain should be “less deferential” and more assertive in its dealings with America, and it recommended that the term “special relationship” be abandoned.
The British government would seem to agree. In a speech a few weeks ago, Foreign Secretary William Hague— while calling the bond with the U.S. “unbreakable” — nevertheless said Britain should pursue “enlightened national interest” through developing alliances with countries such as Brazil and India rather than relying on America and Europe.
In part, the Cameron/Liberal Democrat coalition government is reacting to the public’s anti-Americanism. But it also seems to have concluded that Obama is a weak president who has proved indecisive against his country’s enemies while lashing out at its allies.
The oil might stop gushing into the Gulf of Mexico — but the waters of the “special relationship” upon which it so toxically poured still remain troubled.
by Melanie Phillips at July 22, 2010 04:19 PM
Welcome to our web of lies. Become entwined in Episode 36‘s multitude of untruthful deceit. Be deceived by our woven evil. Then listen as John’s house falls down.
And while pictures are appearing, here’s that bench:
Then, pear/blueberry cider lengthily discussed, we get around to reading out some of the last million years of emails. And you kept telling us to do this, so you can’t complain.
Does Coke taste better out of a glass? What are the odds of sitting in the United States? Should we stop whining?
Is Nick’s science dodgy? Is that a microphone, or are you just pleased to be recording a podcast? Is Rupert Murdoch Australian? Is Nick safe in your dreams?
Is there a more awful hairdressers name than this?
We then sidetrack into discussing Richard Herring’s As It Occurs To Me, at some length. Then when the name-dropping begins, Douglas Adams.
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by John Walker at July 22, 2010 10:16 AM
July 19, 2010
Daily Mail, 19 July 2010
By now, we are all so used to stories of EU profligacy and intrusive ineptitude that surely we should be inoculated against amazement or outrage.
Nevertheless, the revelations over the weekend about the activities of Lady Ashton, the EU High Representative, still take the breath away.
It appears that the noble Baroness and British Labour Party loyalist — who is effectively the EU foreign minister — is interviewing prospective ambassadors and senior officials to create the European External Action Service (EEAS) of EU diplomats.
Governments were originally promised that this new bureaucratic empire, which has been brought into being by the Lisbon Treaty (the one that created the EU constitution on which the British public were denied a vote), would entail no extra cost to taxpayers.
But a former chief accountant of the European Commission has estimated that it is likely to cost at least an extra £45 million to set up. And just look at what is being established here.
The EEAS will control a budget of £5.8 billion, including the EU’s enormous aid and development packages and the costs of peacekeeping operations in global trouble spots. To administer this, a vast infrastructure is being created of 7,000 civil servants, with embassies around the world.
And this when the countries of Europe are under the financial cosh as never before, and with the British Foreign office planning to cut its costs by up to 40 per cent in order to help cut this country’s budget deficit.
But then the EU never did observe the same rules that govern mere nations, such as prudence, accountability or proportionality.
To a bureaucracy whose profligacy would have made even the Sun King Louis XIV blush, what’s a little thing like the global economic crisis — particularly when there is a whole new political order to be created?
For let us not forget that the very purpose of Lady Ashton’s burgeoning empire is to undermine and even negate the ability of individual countries to have their own foreign policy.
That’s why, as Britain’s embassies and consulates in smaller countries are forced to shut down, their duties will be passed to the new network of 136 EU embassies.
That’s why High Representative Lady Ashton says she will be speaking on behalf of the EU countries’ 27 foreign ministers on global conflicts such as the Middle East or Iran.
But the idea that anyone should be able to speak ‘for’ William Hague or the foreign ministers of other EU member states is preposterous. These countries employ Foreign Ministers to be the voice of their nation abroad. They don’t need anyone to speak for them.
The real purpose of the EU High Representative is to override what they are saying, and to substitute for the foreign policies of democratic nations an approach that has no popular mandate.
For this EU superstate, which so grandiosely lays claim to a collective voice on foreign affairs, has no coherence, identity or legitimacy — except what was brought into being by craven politicians whose electorates have remained overwhelmingly hostile to this coup d’etat against national self-government.
Indeed, the EEAS will be taking foreign policy decisions that may well run entirely counter to the policies and interests of member states — but which, frighteningly, Britain and other EU countries will be forbidden to oppose.
In order for all 27 member states to agree on a united foreign policy, they will inevitably be forced to coalesce around the lowest common denominator. Though such a position will be weak — maybe dangerously so in the case, say, of Iran — neither Britain nor any other country will be able to pursue its own foreign policy.
This is because the Maastricht Treaty (remember the fight that was lost over that?) lays down that every country inside the EU must ‘actively and unreservedly’ support the EU’s foreign and security policy, and must do nothing that is ‘likely to impair its effectiveness as a cohesive force in international relations’.
This common foreign and security policy has already made Europe weaker, leading to inaction or to positions dominated by France and Germany.
And now, at astronomical cost, an infrastructure is being bolted into place under Lady Ashton that will turn the foreign ministries of Europe into a ghostly hall of mirrors.
It is not just the foreign ministers who will find themselves second-guessed and undermined by the High Representative. Every country’s ambassadors and foreign embassies will be replicated by EU duplicates.
In other words, the whole thing is nothing other than extravagantly subsidised megalomania. In truth, Jonathan Swift or Franz Kafka would have had difficulty conjuring from their imaginations something quite as preposterous as this.
And on top of this whole baroque edifice of extra-territorial excess sits Baroness Ashton, the living embodiment of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pooh-Bah or Lady High Everything Else, whose epic expenditure appears to be matched in scale only by her incompetence.
Indeed, both the way in which she was appointed to her £270,000-a-year post and her subsequent performance in office have provided a veritable parable of the cavorting caravan of the contemptuous and the contemptible that is the EU.
It was suggested that Gordon Brown had wanted the post of High Representative filled by David Miliband or Peter Mandelson, but that he was outmanoeuvred by France and Germany, who believed they could control someone as inexperienced as Lady Ashton.
And yet these countries have been queuing up to moan about her incompetence. The German magazine Der Spiegel called her ‘a walking disaster’, with a German MEP saying she was ‘simply out of her depth’.
The French went for her throat after she failed to visit Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake there — she argued in her own defence that ‘disaster tourism’ would detract from vital humanitarian efforts.
The French Europe minister even insultingly told her to brush up on her French — an offer she humiliatingly accepted by enrolling for a week at a French residential language school. Oh dear.
There were also reports that she was neglecting her duties by returning to Britain most weekends to be with her family and refusing to take calls after 8pm. Complaints about her amateurism and even incompetence erupted across the EU. officials sniped that she had become the ‘mediocrity everybody loves to hate’.
But the criticism also laid bare the competition for primacy between the High Representative and the other two main EU figureheads, the presidents of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, and the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso.
All three lay claim to being the voice of the EU in the foreign councils of the world. In the EU’s hall of mirrors, even Pooh-Bah, it appears, comes in multiples of three.
It is the other side of Henry Kissinger’s famous aside that when he wanted to speak to Europe he needed to know which number to call.
Well, now there are multiple numbers — an exponentially increasing empire to service them, paid for by the long-suffering British and European public even as their own foreign services and powers of self-government are decimated.
Lady Ashton’s performance has been a humiliation for Britain. But it has also shown up the EU’s endemic incoherence and arrogant excess.
‘No taxation without representation,’ goes the defining slogan of democracy. But in the EU, it seems, there’s not so much representation as replication — with the progressively disenfranchised being fleeced to provide it.
by Melanie Phillips at July 19, 2010 06:59 AM
July 15, 2010
It’s a back to basics, good old fashioned family values 35th episode of Rum Doings. Just Nick, John, a microphone and a disgusting bottle of rum. And this week we’re not discussing whether FIFA should have to bring in the rule that they should have the cameras in the goal posts to see if the goals are scored instigated.
We bring you some genuinely excellent news from Sainsbury’s (which apparently might be quite old news), and then move on to talk about John’s weekend break, and the joys of a British B&B. This of course involves tales of ketchup and coffee.
We talk about awful people, and responses to cold callers. Nick predicts the end-times, which brings us to the stories about the BP methane bubble. And where exactly does oil come from?
We finish by talking about Raoul Moat, although this was recorded before Cameron made his remarkable comments about feeling no sympathy.
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by John Walker at July 15, 2010 11:02 AM
It has been decreed by our Prime Minister that no one should feel sympathy for Raoul Moat. In a comment made in Prime Minister’s Questions today, he said:
“As far as I can see, it is absolutely clear, that Raoul Moat is a callous murderer. Full stop, end of story. And I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims, and for the havoc he wreaked in that community. There should be no sympathy for him.”
Just to be clear, obviously Moat’s crimes were terrible. And his victims of course deserve abundant sympathy. The “wave of public sympathy” to which Cameron refers is the much publicised, and obviously ludicrous, Facebook groups in which people are supporting Moat as a hero. No matter what the circumstances of someone’s life, perhaps it’s reasonable to suggest that at the point they start murdering people one should cross them off the hero list. Unless they’re Batman.
However, the idea that in not supporting/endorsing a murderer’s actions one must backflip to the opposite extreme, and exhibit no sympathy at all, is quite extraordinary. It is, in fact, inhuman.
Whether Moat became so awful after an idyllic or abusive childhood and life isn’t really relevant. Although the chances are that someone who was so frequently in trouble with the police, someone capable of assaulting children, someone whose response to a girlfriend’s leaving him is to attempt to murder her and her new partner, did not have a great life. People don’t wake up one morning and think, “I’ll be evil from now on. Muah ha ha.” But of course many people have shitty lives, and they certainly don’t go on to be the sort of person Moat was. Nothing, at any point, excuses such actions by an adult. Other than, of course, mental illness.
But why does any of this exclude Moat from sympathy? He certainly has my sympathy. To be so broken, so damaged, so pathetic – that earns my sympathy.
I don’t doubt for a moment that Moat could have been quite a different person if given a different life. It appears even he was conscious of this, the latest stories revealing his own denied requests for a psychiatrist. He told social workers,
“The more you block things out, the more numb you become in the heart you know. You get to a point where happiness to you is just like, you know, neither here nor there.”
I feel sympathy for him for having felt this way.
The most remarkable thing to come out of the Moat story has been the response from the policeman who was shot. David Rathband, likely to be permanently blind after being shot in the face, said something extraordinary.
“I bear no malice towards the man who shot me, but now wish to move on with my life.”
To have this response highlights the grotesque nature of Cameron’s remark.
It’s much easier to demonise a murderer than to consider them a human. To cast them as a one-dimensional monster lets us feel much safer about ourselves. To consider otherwise is to consider that it could have been us. Because, of course, it could have.
To reject sympathy is so horribly dangerous. Perhaps it’s partly because so many people conflate sympathy with endorsing something. Anyone suggesting that Moat’s actions were in any way valid is clearly ridiculous. But to sympathise has nothing to do with such suggestions. It is, instead, to recognise Moat as another human being. When we stop recognising people as human beings we enter into a dark and dangerous territory. One our Prime Minister is suggesting we should all be in.
by John Walker at July 15, 2010 12:49 AM
July 12, 2010
Daily Mail, 12 July 2010
This week, we will start to see whether the coalition government really will put our money where its mouth is. It now has an unrivalled opportunity to reform the NHS.
Public service repair lies at the very heart of the Tories’ agenda. They have also been warning the public for weeks now of bloodcurdling cuts to public spending, with so far only minimal protest.
The LibDems are bolted into the project; the Labour Party, which is behaving with all the finesse of a wrecking ball, currently appears determined to bolt from reality altogether.
As Hilaire Belloc might have put it about the reform programme, ‘the stocks were sold, the press was squared, the middle class was quite prepared’ (well, as much as they will ever be).
Today, the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley unveils his NHS White Paper. Yet, unfortunately, rather than showing the way to the promised land of radical reform, he appears to be trapped on the treacherous slopes of Mount Improbable.
His first problem is that the astronomical £100-billion health budget has been ring-fenced against the cuts being planned for the rest of the public sector. Supposedly intended to protect the NHS, its real purpose is actually to protect the Conservative Party from attack by the Left as ‘the nasty party’.
But it is all too likely to hold back the change that health provision so desperately needs. For the unprecedented spending increases of recent years have largely disappeared into the back holes of NHS salaries and pointless bureaucracy, with relatively little improvement to front-line services.
Lansley claims that he will now spend this money far more wisely. For example, he proposes to make a bonfire of health quangos. Such bodies are indeed often worse than useless.But they are nevertheless small beer, and their abolition will make scarcely any impact on NHS spending.
His reported showpiece proposal is to hand control of budgets and commissioning to GPs, with power taken away from primary care trusts and strategic health authorities.
Oh dear. The last thing that’s needed right now is yet another massive reorganisation, which may well incur even greater costs. According to Professor Chris Ham, Chief Executive of the King’s Fund independent health charity, it could mean yet more paperwork — and that GPs would be likely to demand more money for the additional responsibilities, as we saw in the controversy which followed their self-aggrandising contracts not so long ago.
It also surely runs the risk of fragmenting the service, since GPs will try to look after their own clinical patch rather than the general good. And this gets to the crux of the problem. A national service needs to offer unified provision throughout the country in order to be seen to be equitable.
That means inescapably top-down government control. Any attempt to outsource accountability for taxpayers’ money means the service is no longer run in the interests of all but for the benefit of producer groups, such as GPs, who would be controlling the purse strings.
But too many patients already lose out. What’s desperately needed instead is to give patients that control. After all, isn’t devolution of power to the public what Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is supposed to be all about? That means replacing the NHS altogether, either by a voucher scheme or a continental-style social insurance model.
Cameron has deemed the NHS to be sacrosanct, primarily for political reasons. He is probably also emotionally attached to it on account of the care with which it treated his disabled son Ivan during his short life. We can all deeply sympathise with such feelings.
But others of us have had less happy experiences with the NHS — particularly the way in which too often it treats the elderly poor with neglect or contempt. The key to these distressing experiences is that patients — or their families — cannot control their care because they don’t control the purse strings.
Doctors and nurses are thus accountable not to patients but instead to NHS managers and Whitehall. Moreover, if GPs are given responsibility for the health budget, their overriding ethical duty to each patient will have to be balanced against their responsibility to the wider community. And these obligations may be in conflict.
The only fair solution is for the individual patient to drive the process of healthcare provision. Stephen Dorrell, the Tory chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee — and who cannot remotely be called a heartless right-wing caveman — has proposed that the NHS should be replaced by a voucher plan for patients to buy their own treatment.
As he says, many suffering from a long term condition have a better idea of what to do about it than their local GP. Moreover, far from being ‘fair’, the NHS favours the middle class which has the sharp elbows to play the system.
Only some kind of voucher or social insurance system gives power to the poor to enable them to lever upwards the often rotten standards of treatment with which the NHS currently fobs them off.
The Coalition has the right instincts. But through political timidity or intellectual confusion or a combination of the two, it is not allowing itself to think the unthinkable about the NHS and other public services — and is thus risking the very failure it dreads.
The history of the past three decades has been one of repeated attempts to reform public services. Indeed, the NHS has been subjected to near-continuous reorganisation for much of its existence.
However well-intentioned or apparently imaginative, all such attempts are doomed to failure unless the fundamental problem is acknowledged — that taxpayer-funded public services administered by central government don’t work.
Spatchcocking on to this system initiatives designed to shunt responsibility downwards merely moves centralised control a little lower down the administrative food chain.
Both Lansley and the Education Secretary Michael Gove are having to work with one hand tied behind their backs because of an overabundance of political caution. Yet such timidity will not protect them from the hounds of public service hell.
Gove’s much-vaunted ‘free schools’ will not actually be free of central controls over profit-making or academic selection. Yet despite the less than radical scope of his reforms, he has already found he has stepped into a minefield.
His modest proposal to cancel rebuilding or refurbishment plans at 700 schools blew up in his face when he inadvertently presented misleading information supplied by his civil servants — after he had accused the relevant quango of incompetence and profligacy.
With the blame game in full swing, it’s not clear where responsibility for this particular debacle actually lies. But as if this wasn’t bad enough, suddenly Tory MPs have succumbed to epidemic Nimbyism as they too turn upon the hapless Gove in order to protect the school building projects in their own back yard.
The danger now is that all this sound and fury being whipped up over Gove’s reforms will cause the Coalition to lose its nerve altogether for fear of even worse storms ahead. But ministers should realise that the only way to come through such concerted resistance is go even further in the direction that is being so loudly challenged.
Both Lansley and Gove should use every instance of reactionary opposition to ratchet up the radicalism. Significant change has to be coherent and uncompromising. Half-baked reform which cringes from controversy will inevitably end in failure.
In for a penny, in for a pound after all. And as we all know, these are currently in very short supply.
by Melanie Phillips at July 12, 2010 05:02 AM
July 07, 2010
Wall Street Journal (Europe), 7 July 2010
In both Britain and America, ideological prejudices are coming to undermine the rule of law. In a number of incidents, people who have committed criminal acts have been acquitted or had their cases dismissed purely because they represent a politically correct cause or belong to a ‘powerless’ victim group.
An English jury decided in September 2008 that causing more than £35,000 of damage to a coal-fired power station was justified as a protest against man-made global warming. The jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage after they argued that they had a ‘lawful excuse’ to trash property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater harm caused by climate change.
The jurors arrived at this decision having sat through a propaganda barrage by prominent advocates of the man-made global warming theory, including the pioneer green evangelist James Hansen and the environmental campaigner and newly elected Tory MP Zac Goldsmith.
The court case was thus effectively turned into a platform for tendentious ideological propaganda, which appears not only to have been endorsed by the jurors but to have persuaded them that it even justified destroying someone’s property.
In a similar English case last month at Hove Crown Court, seven activists were acquitted after causing £180,000 in damage to an arms factory owned by a company that sold military equipment to Israel, when they argued they were seeking to prevent ‘Israeli war crimes’ against Palestinians.
The activists had broken into the factory at night, having previously videotaped interviews declaring their intention to smash it up. Yet with hostility to the Jewish state now at white-hot levels in Britain, such otherwise criminal activity is deemed to be justified by a jury if it is committed in the cause of damaging Israeli interests.
Even the judge in this case, George Bathurst-Norman, appears to have agreed. In his summing-up, he instructed the jury that ‘you may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time.’
He also highlighted the testimony to the court by Caroline Lucas, a Green member of Parliament, who argued that supposedly ‘all democratic paths had been exhausted’ before the activists had embarked upon their action. What ‘democratic paths’? Israel was trying to prevent Hamas — considered a terrorist organization even by Her Majesty’s government — from firing rockets at Israeli civilians.
Whatever one’s view of that conflict, it is a political opinion. It surely should have nothing to do with the exercise of English law designed to protect people’s property against criminal damage.
It really has come to something when a British judge appears to be encouraging a jury to excuse criminal activity because he sympathizes with the political motive behind it. Thus the impartial administration of justice is now giving way in Britain to bias, bigotry and ideology.
Something very similar is happening in America, too. In May, the U.S. Justice Department suddenly dismissed a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.
Dressed in black uniforms and jackboots, with one of them menacingly tapping a baton, they stood at the entrance of a Philadelphia polling booth on the day Barack Obama was elected president, hurling threats and insults at people turning up to vote, such as ‘white devils’ or ‘You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.’
Despite witness testimonies and even video footage proving their guilt, all charges were dropped against three of the defendants and a mild restraining order was applied to a fourth.
The only reason given by the Justice Department was that ‘the facts and the law’ did not support proceeding with the indictment. The lead attorney on the case, J. Christian Adams, resigned in protest. In his eyes, this was an open and shut case of voter intimidation. ‘It doesn’t get any easier than this,’ he said.
To Mr. Adams, there was no doubt about the real reason for the abandonment of this case. There is a ‘pervasive hostility to bringing these sorts of civil-rights cases’ where the victims are white and the perpetrators are black. This opposition within the Justice Department to a ‘race-neutral enforcement’ of voting-rights laws stretches back to the Bush administration, according to Mr. Adams.
How remarkable that in its neuralgic sensitivity to charges of racial prejudice, the American Justice Department should decide whether or not to proceed with a case on the basis of the color of a defendant’s skin.
But that is precisely the moral and intellectual inversion that has resulted from ‘politically correct’ ideology. Over a wide range of issues — such as racism, environmentalism or anti-Zionism — truth and lies, justice and injustice, victim and victimizer, have all been turned upside down.
Based on the Marxist dogma that power is synonymous with oppression and powerlessness with virtue, such ideology has also given self-designated ‘powerless’ groups a free pass. Whatever wrong they may do or disadvantages they may suffer from are never their fault or their responsibility. It is always the ‘oppressor’ group that is to blame.
The effects of this have been felt across society’s institutions — education, family life, employment, the media. Far from eradicating intolerance and injustice, it has led to bigotry and reverse discrimination against majorities or demonized ‘oppressor’ groups.
So in Britain, it is becoming ever harder for Christians to be allowed to live according to their religious ethics. There has been a string of cases in which Christians have been forced to step down from their jobs as marriage registrars or from adoption panels because they refuse to officiate at gay partnership ceremonies or hand children for adoption by gay couples.
In such cases, it seems there is no longer any room for the exercise of religious conscience. Until now, the law has not required someone to act against their religious beliefs. Doctors, for example, can conscientiously opt out of performing abortions.
Similarly, in instances of gay partnership or gay adoption, the Christian officials should have been allowed to stand down in those cases. But it seems that the demands of the ‘oppressed’ gay groups require the extinction of any contrary interests.
This is an abuse of power and the antithesis of a free and liberal society. Furthermore, what is under assault is not some minority creed but the moral codes that lie at the very root of British society and Western civilization.
Now this onslaught appears to be subverting the rule of law itself. Objectivity and neutrality are being replaced in the justice system by subjectivity and bias. Feelings are being allowed to trump facts. Sympathy with the perceived underdog is being allowed to take precedence over the laws that define society’s benchmarks of tolerable behavior.
If you belong to an ‘oppressed’ group, such as black people, or espouse an approved cause, such as environmentalism, you are now above the law. But if you belong to a despised ‘oppressive’ category, such as Israelis, white people or the coal industry, you can no longer look to the law for protection.
An impartial and objective justice system is fundamental to a free society. When ideology replaces the rule of law, the ultimate result will be rule by lynch mob.
by Melanie Phillips at July 07, 2010 08:45 AM
July 05, 2010
The Australian, 6 July 2010
Hizb ut-Tahrir , which held its controversial rally in Sydney on Sunday, is not just yet another radical Islamist group.
It is one of the most manipulative and effective recruitment fronts for the Islamic jihad, particularly among the educated Muslim young.
It is precisely because its spokesmen do not appear to be wild-eyed fanatics but are usually highly intelligent and even intellectual that it is so appealing and therefore so dangerous.
But because it takes such care to conceal its links to terror, governments in Australia and Britain, where it has managed to establish a significant and highly troubling presence, find it difficult to deal with it.
Liberal societies are reluctant to ban any organisation unless it can be proved to be connected to terrorism or violence. Since neither Australia nor Britain says it has found any such links, they allow HT to continue to operate while monitoring its activities. Hence Sunday’s meeting in Sydney.
But HT members in other countries have been involved in terrorism, and whatever its protestations to the contrary, the organisation actively promotes and encourages violence.
And since it regards itself as a global movement that does not recognise national boundaries, the comforting fiction that it presents no threat to Australia is particularly otiose.
In Russia, HT has been banned since 2003, when the leaders of its Moscow cell were arrested in possession of plastic explosives, grenades, TNT and detonators. In August 2005, nine members of HT in Russia were convicted of illegal possession of weapons and incitement to racial and religious hatred.
In August 2002, HT in Denmark reportedly offered the equivalent of £25,000 to anyone who killed a prominent Danish Jew, producing a hit list of between 15 and 25 leading members of Denmark’s Jewish community.
The leader of HT in Denmark, Fadi Ahmad Abdel Latif, was convicted of incitement to racial hatred for distributing a leaflet urging people to ‘kill them, kill the Jews wherever you find them’.
And last year HT was banned in Bangladesh after the government said it feared the organisation posed ‘a threat to peaceful life’.
Not only does HT explicitly promote violence in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq, but it calls on Muslims everywhere to engage in violent jihad.
HT is dedicated to the creation of a single Islamic state, or caliphate, that ‘will reach the whole world and the rule of the Muslims will reach as far as the day and night’. It believes there is a timeless conflict that governs relations between Muslims and ‘unbelievers’, a conflict it encourages.
On the Harry’s Place website recently, ‘Raziq’, a former HT member, wrote that HT’s efforts in Britain are primarily aimed at disrupting the civic and political integration of British Muslims: ‘They want Muslims to disown citizenship in their hearts, to reject government and all democratic institutions in their minds . . . and to encourage them to work semi-secretly for the return of a lost empire across a massive land base.’
HT makes clear in its literature that peaceful means are not enough to win this conflict and that Muslims are allowed to launch aggressive wars against non-Muslims. Its publications say Islamic religious texts all command Muslims to initiate fighting against disbelievers, ‘even if they do not initiate [it] against us’.
It even justifies the killing of Muslims who do not want to live by these rules. ‘He who does not rule by Islam and rules by a kufr [non-Muslim] system should either retract or be killed.’
It also calls on Muslims to fight Jews everywhere, and engages in vicious anti-Jew invective. Last month, HT in Bangladesh issued a press release to advertise a demonstration about the Gaza flotilla which said: ‘O Muslim armies! Teach the Jews a lesson after which they will need no further lessons. March forth to fight them, eradicate their entity and purify the earth of their filth.’
Its invective radicalises Muslims everywhere to the cause of extremism and jihadi violence.
In Britain, it has had a particularly seismic effect on campus, where its combination of intellectualism, save-the-world idealism and secret-society comradeship has proved devastatingly effective in recruiting even highly westernised students to the jihad.
Britain’s National Union of Students has twice banned HT — in 1994-95 and again in 2004 — holding it ‘responsible for supporting terrorism and publishing material that incites racial hatred’.
The result has been merely that HT has repeatedly changed its name to continue to spread its message on campus. But the students union’s attempt to stop HT has not been echoed by the British government, although the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, promised in opposition to ban it.
Not only has the government refused until now to proscribe it, but it sometimes inadvertently even channelled public funds to it through front organisations.
And it has taken no legal action against it, despite calls by British Jewish leaders for HT to be prosecuted after it repeatedly called on its website for the killing of Jews and the annihilation of Israel.
Several former HT members in Britain have testified to the extraordinary effectiveness of HT’s manipulative mind games on impressionable Muslim youths, and have been in the forefront of arguing that the British government’s refusal to ban it has been a disaster.
Shiraz Maher, who left HT after the London tube and bus bombings in 2005, says there is a real danger in allowing the group to operate freely, as its words may have inspired terrorist activity. One of Britain’s first suicide bombers, Omar Sharif, was partially radicalised by HT activists at King’s College, London.
Maher also notes that HT targets Britain’s many foreign Muslim students in order to project the party’s message back into the Muslim world, where it is severely curbed by local governments.
That’s why public meetings such as the one in Sydney are so important to HT, not just to radicalise Australian Muslims but to boost the organisation’s ability to recruit to the cause in countries that have banned it because they are only too well aware of the lethal threat it poses.
Democratic countries such as Britain and Australia are rightly very reluctant to clamp down on political expression. But the decision that nothing can be done to ban HT’s ‘conveyor belt to terror’ is disastrously naive.
by Melanie Phillips at July 05, 2010 11:06 PM
